Scotland: Towering Ambitions How We Built Britain

This week I'm in Scotland, continuing my journey through Britain,

to discover how 1,000 years of history has shaped the land we live in -

the buildings, the towns and the villages that have made us who we are.

In the story of how we built Britain, Scotland has a special part to play.

A nation with its own distinctive character, a proud country often at odds with its neighbour, England.

And it shows, in a landscape dotted with buildings which look different,

and are different, from anything else in Britain.

For centuries, Scotland was a turbulent place fought over

by warring clans and threatened by invasion from the south, first by the Romans and then the English.

Anybody with money and power built, to protect themselves.

The Scottish landscape is still dominated by their magnificent castles.

Castles come in all shapes and sizes, but they have some

things in common - thick walls, great high towers, battlements.

And the interesting thing is that for Scotland the image of the castle

is so powerful you find it not just in castles, but you find it in

public buildings, you find it even in people's private homes all over Scotland, and right down the ages.

Stirling Castle is the greatest symbol of royal power in the land.

Built by the Stuart kings, it sits high on an outcrop of volcanic rock,

at the nation's heart, linking highlands and lowlands.

Close by is the mighty monument to William Wallace, who defeated

the English at the battle of Stirling Bridge, in the valley below.

In the 16th century, the Stuarts wanted to rival the great courts

of Europe, so Stirling would be both a fortress and a palace.

At the heart of the castle sits the great hall.

It was here that in 1566, Mary Queen Of Scots, celebrated the baptism of her son.

A great banquet was held in this hall, everybody was there,

the French ambassadors, the English ambassadors.

But even so, Mary couldn't resist a little dig at the English.

The servants were all dressed as Satyrs, that is to say half man, half beast, with tails.

Now the English apparently took offence at this because

the Scots believe, or I perhaps I should say used to believe, that the English all had tails.

Hostilities between Scotland and England were suspended in 1603, with the union of the crowns.

Mary's son, James, King of Scotland, was crowned King of England too.

Scotland felt a new confidence and Stirling was its symbol.

Even in more peaceful times, the Scots didn't stop building castles.

Instead they reinvented them.

They're called tower houses, still with all the features

of a fortress, but designed for more comfortable living.

Craigievar, in Aberdeenshire, is an amazing

collection of soaring towers, like something out of a fairy tale.

You almost expect to see the princess leaning from a window,

lowering her golden locks to her princely suitor below.

This isn't mainly built for defence.

The giveaway is there's no drawbridge.

But it wasn't yet time to let down your guard completely.

Well, a stout enough door, with good nails on it,

and behind it, just in case you have unwelcome visitors, this portcullis - what's called a yett,

or a gate, this solid iron barred door, which we'll shut across.

It has a great bolt on it

and a padlock,

so you can lock yourself in -

a bit weird.

Craigievar was not the home of a great warrior or soldier king, but a merchant, William Forbes.

He used his wealth to become the local laird.

And the great glory

of this tower house is the ceiling.

It's thought to have been done by Italian craftsmen,

or people who have been trained in the Italian style,

a beautifully encrusted plaster roof, with these medallions, with faces,

with the date when it was finished, 1626.

There's a funny little thing here. This looks like just a cupboard, which could have anything inside it.

In fact it's a doorway to a secret staircase to the very top of the house.

So if you were under attack you would escape up there.

But it had another use.

The laird, if he wanted to overhear conversations in the great hall,

could hide himself behind the cupboard and listen to what was said.

In Scottish it was called the laird's lug.

Listen to what's going on.

Second floor, with two bedrooms.

And up to the third floor, the fourth, and the fifth, each one with bedrooms.

Now this is the grandest of the bedrooms,

known as the Queen's Room, named like that because

the owners hoped the Queen would come and sleep in the bed.

In fact Queen Victoria did come here, but she never actually stayed the night.

Still, always hope.

A building like Craigievar couldn't be anywhere else but in Scotland.

This is Scottish architecture at its best,

strong but romantic.

As you head south through Aberdeenshire, castles pepper the landscape.

But by the end of the 17th century, the castle was out of fashion.

As one Scottish earl put it, "Who can delight to live in his house as in a prison?"

Kinross House, near Perth.

It embodies a new style of comfort and space.

This is the first big house in Scotland that wasn't built like a castle.

This is the kind of house you could have found in England or anywhere on the continent.

Elegant...refined,

beautiful proportions.

And with not a trace of that feeling that the house is built to

pretend it's protecting you from your enemies.

What a relief it must have been.

Built in the 1680s, Kinross House was designed by the architect Sir William Bruce as his own home.

Through the front door into this huge hall,

columns with gold tops to them.

And then into the formal drawing room.

The clever thing about Bruce was, that for all that he was bringing in

new ideas, he still paid homage to the romance of Scotland's past.

The driveway from Kinross lead straight up, through the house,

through the gardens. You look right down there to Lochleven Castle.

And Lochleven Castle is where, just over 100 years before,

Mary Queen Of Scots had been imprisoned and had made one of her dramatic escapes.

Sir William Bruce had been inspired by the grand buildings he saw on his European travels.

The writer Daniel Defoe called Kinross the most beautiful private residence to be found in Scotland.

And this magnificent room is the biggest room in the house, the Grand Salon.

What a radical break with the past of Scottish buildings this must have been.

Instead of small rooms and little windows, you've got space, height,

and light.

A house like this would have needed a lot of servants, and Bruce was very clever about that, because

he created a whole warren of corridors and little staircases, so that the servants

could come and go and look after the family and their guests without ever bumping into them in the corridors.

And here, for instance, is a little room, probably was a bathroom, as it is today, a tiny cupboard door,

and, lo and behold, a little staircase.

It's rather a tight squeeze but just possible,

though it couldn't have been very easy coming up here with a pitcher of hot water

for the bathroom.

And out into this corridor, which used to be a servant's corridor.

This low ceiling, no decoration or anything. Now it's, of course, used.

But in those days a corridor that ran right down the house with the main rooms for the family

and the guests to right and left, so the servants could patrol up and down the centre and go down here

to the key, the beating heart of the house.

This corridor, tiled all the way, runs the full length of the house,

and off to left and right, room after room after room.

There are rooms for cleaning the silver, there were rooms that were used for cleaning the glass.

There are rooms for the china, wine cellars, there's dry storage, everything you could think of.

Have a look in here for instance.

Look.

This was for washing the china.

Two sinks,

and look at this plate rack.

150 plates it could take.

Those were the days.

Along the east coast is the home of Scotland's unofficial religion...golf.

I'm a non-believer myself, I've never wielded the club.

-Where do I put this?

-Would you like me to help you? High or?

I've never done it before!

-You're having it medium.

-I can't do it in my jacket can I, or can I?

That's the way they played it in the olden days.

-How do you swing, like that?

-That's pretty good.

-And then just hit it?

-Then just hit it.

-Oh, where's it gone?

-It's soared straight down, I mean absolutely on the line.

-Absolutely on the line, straight down the middle of the fairway.

-You're lying!

And you're hooked. No, I'm not.

-The ball's here somewhere.

-Absolutely not.

-That's it then, thank you very much.

-Well, OK.

-Now I know what it's all about.

-Good, David. Are you hooked?

Um, I've had my go.

This is the most celebrated golf course in the world, St Andrews.

-So your two husbands have come here to play this course, yes?

-Yes, sir.

-Correct.

-What brings them, why is it such a dream for them?

-It's every golfer's dream.

-Is it?

Oh, to come to Scotland to play your golf courses.

-Why aren't you two playing?

-We have, a bit.

-We don't qualify.

You have turn in your handicap card, and my handicap is my swing!

-My, I was gonna say.

-What's your handicap?

And my husband says my handicap is my personality, so, they would never let us on!

And it's like a worm that eats into their minds, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Obsessed.

-Yes.

-Day and night, talks about it all the time.

In the shower, even.

In the shower he swings.

-Does he?

-Seriously.

He stand in the shower, as he's showering, he goes...

They may not want him to know that.

I don't care.

Overlooking the course is the club house of the Royal and Ancient.

-Hello.

-Morning, sir.

Morning.

-Can I help you?

-Ah, just want to have a look around.

-Certainly.

Thank you.

It's here that the rules of the game are still decided today.

It's very old-fashioned.

Members must wear ties.

Ladies can only come through these hallowed portals by special invitation.

"Feather ball for use in snow, bright red."

Unusual clubs, looks like a garden rake.

And they look like instruments of torture, which of course is what they are, really.

All designed to frustrate.

300 miles to the northwest, and a whole world away, are the islands of the Outer Hebrides.

Still remote and bound up in a way of life all their own.

I first came to the Outer Hebrides over 40 years ago,

I think it must have been, to cover a general election, as seen from the point of view of the islanders.

And I remember how extremely welcoming and charming they were to a complete stranger.

Do you think that not having television, never actually seeing

the leaders of the parties, means that people aren't so interested in them?

Well, yes, I'm sure that makes a difference because there's no television sets on this island

and we never see the leaders actually addressing meetings or speaking, or seeing what they're like

unless we see their photos in the papers occasionally.

I remember this rather acquired taste of the weather out here,

this low scudding clouds coming in from the Atlantic and the rain.

And then, of course, always the consolation, at the end of the day, of a dram or two.

On the island of Lewis are the last traces of a civilisation

that goes back to earliest times and of a culture that remained largely unchanged until the 20th century.

The islanders scratched a living from the land and the sea as crofters.

They lived in simple cottages called black houses.

Only a few survive.

They're built of stone and turf and thatch.

Life here was really tough.

The crofters didn't have much land, and what they had wasn't very fertile, didn't grow much.

They maybe had a couple of cows, some chickens.

Otherwise it was the sea - they fished for food, and to get a bit of cash in the summer,

collected the seaweed at low tide, the kelp, and sold that.

And of course, there were their houses to build, and just look at

these These are rocks from the hills around, no cement, fitted together.

Look at the size of that and that and that - really hard graft.

Inside a black house lived an entire family of three or more generations, all crammed into this small space.

At the heart of the black house was this open hearth fire, just stones and peat, which burnt day and night.

It of course kept the place warm, it was used for the cooking.

But the most important thing it did was to keep the roof dry.

There was no chimney, the smoke went up into the roof here,

which is just turf and straw, and stopped the rain coming in.

And, in fact, when they built chimneys to these houses,

they started to get ill, because the roof got damp and let the rain in.

So this smoke everywhere is vital. And it has one other property.

It's said that peat itself is an antiseptic, so that breathing the smoke kept you healthy.

Like a theatre set.

Box beds with curtains, very cosy.

We'll see if we can get in.

Oh, my goodness it's hard.

HE GRUNTS AND GROANS

Just under six foot.

I'll have to sleep with my feet curled up.

One half of the black house for humans, this half for animals, and it's almost as large a space.

One idea of it was that the heat from the animals

helped keep the cottage, where the humans lived, warm, and there was a very slight slope,

so that the hot air rose up to the cottage, and equally of course the drainage ran down.

And there's a drain here that leads out.

And then at the end of the winter months, when the animals

went outside, then all the manure would be taken out and put back on the fields, as would the roof.

It wasn't just the manure from the cows they used to fertilise,

but the roof itself, after a year or two, full of smoke,

was a very good fertiliser too.

So it's a complete self-sufficient cycle of life that the crofters had.

It's absolutely magical.

There's a long tradition among the islanders of making the hard-wearing Harris tweed.

One weaver who grew up in a black house is Duncan McCloud, now in his nineties.

And he's still most comfortable speaking the language he grew up with, Gaelic.

How many hours a day would he have done this for, this weaving?

THEY SPEAK GAELIC

You make your own hours, this was the beauty.

But I mean you'd get exhausted after what?

An hour of it is enough or could you go on for two or three hours?

THEY SPEAK GAELIC

You could weave all day without getting overtired.

-Really?

-Yes.

-Just with the noise. Bang, bang, bang.

Can I have, can you ask him if I could have a go?

THEY SPEAK GAELIC

-You've got to give a good...

-Push?

You did really well! >

Very tiring on the legs, like bicycling up hill.

Back on the mainland, I'm heading east through the highlands.

The Victorians found the hard unchanging way of life of the highlanders romantic

and with it came a new fashion for historical romance and a nostalgia for Scotland's past.

And, inevitably, a yearning for the age of the castle.

The most majestic example of this romantic revival is on the far north coast - Dunrobin Castle.

This fairytale palace shows the lengths to which the Victorians would go

in romanticising Scotland's past. All these towers and turrets, really the whole thing taken to excess.

It's as though they were saying, we honour the past,

but we want to make sure we do it on an even grander scale.

Dunrobin Castle was built in the 1840s by Sir Charles Barry,

best known as the architect of the Houses of Parliament.

The style is known as Scots baronial.

It combines the toughness of a Scottish fortress with the elegance of a French chateau.

Ah, June, northern Scotland,

got to keep warm.

BELL CHIMES

The first forms of life you meet inside are stuffed animals.

Ah!

Well! You normally only get the heads, but this is the whole animal.

Heads everywhere.

This is the bed Queen Victoria slept on, when she came here in 1872, I'm told.

I shouldn't sit on it, but I think I will,

because the mattress is the original... Oh! ..horse hair mattress.

That's quite comfortable.

I suppose if you did a DNA test of the mattress, you could find little bits of Queen Victoria left behind.

Dunrobin Castle is the largest private house in the highlands, with 189 rooms.

It was created for the Sutherlands, one of the oldest aristocratic families in Scotland.

By marrying into English money, the Sutherlands had become the fifth richest family in Europe,

but it won them no friends among the highlanders, who lived on their lands.

Towering high over the castle stands the formidable figure of the first duke of Sutherland,

a man still reviled up here, for throwing out thousands

of crofters and turning the land over to more profitable sheep farming.

The "clearances", as they were called, were often conducted with

such cruelty, families driven from their homes by force, that even today, more than 150 years later,

attempts have been made to topple this great column, as retribution.

But the Victorians preferred to focus on the beauties

of the landscape, rather than the harshness of life in the highlands.

Throughout the 19th century, artists and writers were inspired by these dramatic landscapes.

The novelist Bram Stoker chose a castle further down the east coast

for the home of his fictional creation, Count Dracula.

Slains Castle, an eerie place.

There are no sign posts to it, it's not shown on most maps.

What Stoker found most chilling about it, was its position, right on the edge of these jagged rocks

that tumble down into the sea.

"Suddenly I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act

"of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle from whose black windows came

"no ray of light and whose battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.

"In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size and several dark ways

"led from under great ruined arches."

Phwwrrr!

On this coast is a region of cliffs and tiny inlets

where for centuries people made a hard living from the sea.

This is the little fishing village of Creevy.

It's about 300 years old.

And like so many places we've seen in Scotland, it's had to adapt itself to the landscape.

In this case, a tiny strip of land, between the cliffs and the sea,

so narrow that there isn't a road along in front of the houses.

You can drive down to the start of the village and everything else has to be done on foot.

100 years ago, this was a thriving village with over 50 fishing boats working out of the harbour.

It's a bit quieter these days.

There's an interesting thing about the way Creevy is built.

If you look to the top end of the village there,

the cottages are facing out to sea, which would seem the natural way, with a view, lovely view.

But you get just a few houses down, and suddenly they're all end on, just looking in at each other.

And the reason is that when the gales come from the north, that bit of the village is protected,

but from here onwards, the waves smash in to the houses,

and they had to put them that way to protect them,

and incidentally then pull their fishing boats up, between the cottages, to keep them safe as well.

Cottages on this coast were well built

and they're still lived in today, though by rather fewer people.

Now this is one of the of the fishermen's cottages,

and you have to imagine this with a whole family living in this tiny little space.

Here's the cooking range,

a little oven down here.

Kettle on the hob.

It's uneconomic, one fisherman told me, not to have a wife if you're a fisherman, because your mother

can't bait the hooks for your father and yourself.

You have to have your own wife, and her job, with all the children, is to sit here and just put bait,

shellfish or something like that, on hook after hook after hook to go line fishing.

And the floor, which would have been rather suitable for this,

was earth and sand spread on it, very efficient,

kept warm, because you were all in this tiny little space.

Today, there's only one local fisherman still operating his boat on this stretch of coast.

So what's happened for you to be the last one fishing?

Well, at one time you could make quite a bit of money,

and it could be quite a good lifestyle,

but then there's no steady income.

And families now need to get... Because they've got children, they need a regular income.

What's cottage life in a village like? Did you have a room of your own?

No, no. We'd a living room and a pantry and it was an outside toilet, just across the lane.

And up the stair there was a big bedroom, like a bigger bedroom, and a smaller bedroom.

And there was me and my father and my sister.

-And bathrooms?

-Oh, no bathrooms.

But we kept ourselves clean, of course, in the sink.

We had big sinks and my mother just used to put us into the sink.

Or we didn't ha' a galvanised tub, but we'd a fairly big sink.

Of course we were smaller then as well, you see.

You wouldn't fit into a sink nowadays, would you?

Definitely not oh, my goodness no!

It's enough I need to fit into the bath!

With the introduction of big steam-driven trawlers,

many villages moved out to work in the larger ports.

The biggest fishing port in Scotland in the 19th century was Aberdeen.

Its wealth created some of Scotland's grandest civic buildings.

Almost every building in Aberdeen is made of granite,

one of the hardest stones you can find.

To split granite, you hammer in wedges and wait for it to fall apart.

Ah! It's going!

Ah!

-What do you get paid for doing that an hour?

-Very little!

Kenmore quarry supplied much of the granite for Aberdeen.

It's left behind a spooky green lake, 450 feet deep.

If you go to Aberdeen and see the buildings that were made with stone from this quarry,

are they still in the condition they were 100 years ago or so?

Oh, yes, aye. Some of it maybe got a bit faded but if they gonna wash 'em, take 'em back, and they'll still be

looking as good they were the day they were built.

-So it's really durable.

-It's durable, very durable.

-Do you like the look of it?

-Oh, yes.

Not brick - I don't like the look of brick.

You're against brick, are you?

-Oh, yes.

-Why?

It doesn't weather as well as granite.

It looks OK when it's new built, but it doesn't stand the test of time, as granite does.

Granite will be here longest, and we're all gone.

To promote the merits of granite you couldn't do better than show off Marshall College, in Aberdeen.

Marshall is more like a great cathedral than a university,

with its forest of strangely shaped towers, etched against the sky.

It's a building like none other.

This is the second largest granite building in the world, the pride of Aberdeen, the granite city.

Now some people don't like granite. They find it dark, gloomy,

and when it rains it certainly does go a very dark grey.

But then when the sun comes out, on a day like today, the stone actually

sparkles with what seem to be little chips of diamond in it.

And the whole thing comes alive, this hard unyielding stone dancing with light.

THUNDER

Scots are rightly proud of all their inventions.

But there's one invention of a Scot that really has made

a major contribution to how we built Britain.

It's the invention of John Loudon Macadam.

Macadam was fed up of not being able to drive around when,

on days like this, the rain came down and the roads turned to mush.

And he worked out that if you used even sized stones, and packed them

down together tight, the roads would hold against any weather.

The stones had to be two inches across, no bigger.

And when he got his stone masons making them, he said,

if it'll go in you mouth, it's all right. If you can't get it into your mouth, it's too big.

And one day he was going around, he saw a pile of stones. "What are these? Much too big!"

He turned to the stone mason, saw he'd got a huge mouth and no teeth!

Anyway that was Macadam.

He transformed roads, not just in Scotland,

all over the United Kingdom, in Europe and in the rest of the world.

God bless John Macadam.

The late 19th century saw Scotland enjoying an industrial boom.

One city in particular would prosper so much, it became known as the engine room of the empire.

Glasgow.

Glasgow's wealth was based on trade and ship building.

At the height of its fortune, one in five of the world's ships was built here, on the River Clyde.

Between 1800 and 1900, Glasgow grew from a population of

80,000 to 800,000, making it the sixth largest city in Europe.

And, of course, all that created a huge demand for housing.

Glasgow architects were among the first in Britain to build tall.

And they created a new Scottish form of building, the tenement.

Tenements have a terrible reputation as the filthy, miserable dwellings of the poor.

And it's true the over crowded, badly maintained tenements

in the Gorbals became hellish places to live.

They were pulled down in the 1960s to make way for high rise flats.

But tenements were built for the middle classes as well, and many of them survive.

Simple and efficient, they're designed to make maximum use of limited space.

They stand four storeys high, with two or three apartments

on each floor, served by a central staircase.

One home here is pretty much as it was at the end of the 19th century.

Solid stone staircase.

This firm banister rail with these little brass knobs so that children can't go... Ow! ..sliding down.

BELL RINGS

Nice doorbell.

Right, we come into the lobby -

very dark, just like houses were 100 years ago.

It's lit by gas, not by electricity.

There's a slight hiss,

and just this slightly sweet sickly smell.

You see it's small, this tenement house, but it's very comfortable.

The clever thing was everything had its place. They were very neatly organised.

For instance, have a look in here.

Open it up, and lo and behold,

double bed, in a cupboard built into the wall.

They actually decided these were unhygienic in the end, and in 1900

they banned them, but this is the original.

And next door to the parlour, the bedroom.

The only bedroom in a four-roomed tenement.

Now this is the great jewel of the tenement, this is a kitchen exactly

as it would have been in 1890 or so, when it was built.

And then this glorious stove, all black and silver,

simply magical.

Now there's one big surprise in this kitchen,

which is here, which you think might be concealing china or whatever.

Lo and behold,

it's another bed.

So the last room, and this is interesting, is the bathroom.

Lavatory there, big sink

and a bath heated from the boiler in the kitchen.

Well, I think I'll get into it and just see.

Oh!

It's narrow, which of course saves the hot water.

You're covered with about three or four inches of water.

And very comfortable.

I like a bath you can read in, without sliding down.

Very good.

In the early 1900s, 5,000 tenements were built each year in Glasgow.

To attract middle class residents elaborate features were provided.

Tiled staircases

and stained glass windows - a throw-back to a medieval past.

Tenements were like the castles of the modern city.

One block even sported a baronial flourish to prove it.

And the castle theme can be seen again in one of Scotland's most famous buildings.

It wasn't built for the military or for housing, but for art students, the Glasgow School of Art.

It was designed in 1896, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Mackintosh had a strong sense of the Scottish architecture of the past,

but he took it forward into the modern age.

-Morning.

-Morning.

Sometimes you can come into a building by a grand architect and it feels, you know, a bit intimidating.

The nice thing about Mackintosh is it's so friendly, welcoming, warm.

Warm and a bit worn too, because for 100 years, it's had students in and out, and it shows it.

It was built quite cheaply but the design is magic and it stood

the test of time, so much so it'll be here in another 100, 200 years.

And so much so that thousands of people come here every year, just to have a look

at these spaces and how he built them.

Mackintosh is much loved today, not just for his buildings,

but for the care he put into all the fittings that go into a building.

Everything carries his personal stamp.

Some parts of the building are big open spaces, other bits you could be in an old castle,

these great buttresses and arches here.

And then little bits of decoration he put in - these tiles all the way up, one set there, one set there.

And this is one of the great rooms, the library, completely improbable.

Look at the lights - they could have been designed yesterday.

And then this great gallery all the way round

with balustrades with little bits of colour.

Astonishing place.

And then every little detail worked on. Here look at these,

strange sort of Indian shapes, with little arches cut, and each one different

so they sort of play tunes.

# Da, da, te, dum, ta, ta, da, he, he, di, di, di, da, de, da. #

Just very playful and nice.

The last leg of this Scottish journey takes us inevitably to the capital city, Edinburgh.

At one end of Edinburgh stands the castle.

Like Stirling, it's poised high on a rocky outcrop.

A superb defensive position.

At the other, sits a new symbol of Scottish identity,

a home for self government in Scotland.

Everywhere we've been in Scotland, we've been looking at buildings

with strong character, some of which shout their Scottishness.

Well, now we come to the latest great Scottish building, the Scottish Parliament, and, frankly,

from the outside, it's a disappointment.

To me it could be any old Spanish airport terminal.

But you wait till you come inside.

The architect of the parliament building was in fact a Spaniard, Enrique Miralles, from Barcelona.

His design was deliberately unconventional, and doesn't attempt to build on Scottish tradition.

It's very nice and light and it's rather refreshing this building,

on the inside, very different from what you see of the outside.

All very strange shapes, different angles.

Whether anybody can ever find their way around the building, I do not know.

I'm lost,

and the floor doesn't help.

This is a thoroughly modern building with state-of-the-art technology in the committee rooms.

What do you think of the look of the room, generally?

Oh, I think they're lovely. I love the building. I love working here.

-It's just a wonderful environment, it's great.

-In what way?

It's inspiring, the views are great.

The rooms are all different. There's not two bits of the building that are

the same. I don't think there's a single right angle in the place.

Everything is just new and exciting.

And I'm still finding bits of the building

that I haven't been in before, and it never ceases to surprise me.

There we are.

This is the debating chamber itself.

Scottish MPs sit here in a semicircle.

It's the European model, meant to encourage compromise

as opposed to the gladiatorial struggles at Westminster

where MPs glare at each other across the floor.

The presiding officer sits here...

..in the high chair with two clerks either side.

And you see he's got a very old-fashioned...

THUMPING

The only non-electronic bit of the chamber.

There's a rather odd detail here which is

meant to represent the people of Scotland,

watching over the proceedings.

But when tour guides go around they say that they look like whisky bottles.

Perhaps that's what you need, to get you through a debate.

After seeing so many buildings which reflect Scotland's past,

it's confusing to find one which so resolutely refuses to be Scottish.

I suppose it could be a sign of confidence about what the future holds, or a sign of uncertainty.

Next week, my journey takes me to the west,

to the great cities of Bath and Bristol and Dublin...

..to see how the Georgian dream of order

and perfection transformed the way we built Britain.

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